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There was a MASSIVE topic here on Lan at one stage when it was announced that it wouldn’t be in HGL…
So thought some people might like to discuss what repurcussions if any would exist in Diablo 3 for not having it as per the latest announcement by Jay Wilson.
This is from a translated interview by diablo3.4gamer.de
The video can be watched at Hellforge.
His vitriolic words are aimed towards those with ‘unreasonable’ complaints against Diablo 3’s art direction, and each of the player complaints are addressed one by one in the video.
What was once Blizzard Guru is now Hellforge.
Hellforge is not your average Diablo III fansite.
We offer a more fully featured way for you to discuss Diablo III. Look, to us it’s all about the community. Any old fan site can post news, content… the typical stuff. But there are not a lot of sites out there that accommodate your opinions. None, in fact. To most sites, it’s all about listening to the staff and what they think.
With us, it’s about you. You tell us what you want to say. Just create a blog, and write a post. Put your opinions out there and be heard. It’s as simple as posting on a forum.
You can upload your own videos as well as images for all to see. Writing your own blog, responding to one, or simply posting on a traditional forum?
It’s all up to you.
While not strictly related to Blizzard, we’ve been following the progress of the former Flagship Studios’ developers, so this is relevant.
GameCyte has a new interview up with two of them who have started a new studio, Runic Games, who are Max Schaeferand Travis Baldree. The interview delves deep into why the company moved, why they think FSS failed like it did. It specifically mentions the current state of FSS right now as well. Specifically Max makes an emphasis on the fact that for all intents and purposes Flagship Studios is closed down, and Bill is just there to finish off the closure.
Max then goes on to talk about his brother and his involvement with the team. It then goes on to talk about if FSS had any chance of staying open. They then talk of the sorts of games they want to make with the new studios.
Next they talk about the game’s (Mythos) differentiation with Diablo 3 and Sacred 2, as well as the whole colour issue in Diablo 3. Lastly they mention that Namco at the moment is just handling the box sales of Hellgate London, but there is no current knowledge of what they plan to do with the game later.
WarCry network has posted up a new interview with Runic Games founder, Travis Baldree. He talks of the new studio, talks a little bit about Diablo 3 which may be their direct competition later, the sorts of games they want to make as well as what payment systems they are thinking of doing.
Tiggs, who is now sporting a Namco logo posted this today regarding the status of the Hellgate: London Test Center:
At this time we have decided to keep Test Center out of service and encourage all players to return to our “Live” servers. We will ensure that Publish 2.0 is kept safe should Test Center return to service in the future.
Thank you for all your testing and bug reporting.
Read what you will into it, but it may not do much to help the game’s dwindling population. With that said, it’s very reassuring to see Tiggs and many other Ping-0 community managers sporting a new Namco logo. The Namco logo is however noticeably absent from the profile of Flagship’s community manager, Scapes.
The official website has been updated with news of a weekly maintenance:
The Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU) servers will be undergoing weekly maintenance starting Thursday. The Shulgoth server will go down at 6:00 AM PST. The Sydonai server will go down later that evening at 8:00 PM PT (0300 GMT). The estimated downtime for each server is one hour.
Enjoy 
The latest issue of PC Powerplay, an Australian Gaming magazine (Issue #155) has featured a cover story on Blizzard a feature a main report on Diablo 3 that consists of a a five page write up, with exclusive screenshots and information about the game.
Blizzard Guru has uploaded scans of the magazine on their forums, which include an interview conducted some time after WWI about the game’s art direction, the implementation of health globes and some general talk about how the game is shaping up to be. There’s also a separate article on item randomization and talk about the new classes, and a snippet of rumors on what the new Battle.net 2 will bring to the table.
The issue also features a preview of Starcraft 2 and a feature on popular Diablo 2 mods for those of you still playing the good old game.
HanbitSoft has lashed out against Flagship Studios in the Korean press, in the wake of the recent turbulence at the San Francisco-based game development studio calling them “selfish and irresponsible”. Details are as follows:
Bill Roper and Directors of Flagship Studios Bear Responsibility
- HanbitSoft making good progress in securing intellectual property rights for Hellgate: London
- HanbitSoft is preparing for a lawsuit against Bill Roper and the founding directors of Flagship Studios.Last weekend, Flagship Studios announced that former employees were fired and HanbitSoft mentioned that all measures were proceeding as planned to the benefit of players (in Korea) to ensure that continued service of Hellgate: London would be seamless despite the current problems at its development studio. In addition, HanbitSoft holds the executives of Flagship Studios fully responsible for the incident towards the rights and interests of the users and stakeholders, including shareholders and other parties involved. HanbitSoft is considering taking strong legal action against Flagship Studios in order to take them to task for their responsibilities.
HanbitSoft does not expect to have any difficulty in securing the exclusive intellectual property rights related to Mythos. HanbitSoft is prepared to deal with Comerica bank in a local visit to them next week in order to secure and acquire the intellectual property rights of Hellgate: London. HanbitSoft believes that the game has nothing to do with the aforementioned bank as HanbitSoft already holds the rights to the game in Asia. HanbitSoft believes it has a strong possibility of acquiring the intellectual property of Hellgate: London in the United States and the rest of the world.
HanbitSoft stated that they will be devising a plan to continue work on the games with local (Korean) game developers in order to see the game through.
HanbitSoft’s CEO Kim Ki-Young stated, “Hellgate: London has a strong possibility of being ‘reborn’ into an excellent game with an outstanding product life,” he continued to say that “With more than 500 people at its disposal, both in-house and outsourced contracts who are veteran developers of every genre ranging from casual games to hardcore MMORPGs, we are ready to recreate Hellgate: London into an excellent game.”
He continued, “We don’t have to recruit existing developers, however if we could do so, we could shorten the time for analysis and developing for users. Although we are trying our best, since Flagship Studios doesn’t want to cooperate, we have no choice.”
According to HanbitSoft, they offered several methods and the means to keep Flagship alive in consideration of the users, but Flagship majorly lacked in effort. Hanbitsoft already has offered large amounts of investments but Flagship replied with ridiculous counter-offers and the negotiations went south. Even so, HanbitSoft continued to make investment offers which were all rejected, leading to the lay-offs of all of the Flagship employees.
HanbitSoft also stated, “Flagship not only lacked effort, but were only looking for personal gain. Firing all of the Flagship employees in order to protect the personal interests of its founding members only shows how selfish and irresponsible they are.”
Flagship Studios is an incorporated company. Hence if any problems occur within this company, it doesn’t affect the finances of any of Flagship Studios’ founders.
HanbitSoft said they are going to take legal proceedings as Flagship Studios is legally responsible for a serious breach of duty in not protecting their stockholder’s rights. The legal proceedings will be done against Flagship’s founders and management people for their intellectual property. HanbitSoft currently owns a 9.5% stake in Flagship Studios.
Korean source: ThisIsGame
Ongoing coverage:
Mythos Team Bids Farewell
Flagship Studios Still In Operations
HanbitSoft Boss Comments On Flagship Studios
Flagship Studios Is Dead
Flagship No Longer Owns Hellgate: London
Flagship’s Community Manager, Taylor Balbi, has revealed to VE3D that all Ping0 and Flagship Studios staff have been made redundant. According to Taylor and the VE3D article, employees were notified at a company meeting and subsequently informed that the offices will be officially closed on Saturday. The source went on to reveal that three of the studio’s top brass dug into their own pockets to provide 30 days of pay to all employees.
As mentioned earlier, word of the studio’s closure reached HanbitSoft, leading to an early press release regarding the control over the Hellgate: London intellectual property that lead to a stern rebuttal from an official source in Flagship Studios, which, subsequently lead to a HanbitSoft lawyer posting the following sentence on our very website: “It is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open.”
As also referenced in the legal release, HanbitSoft hopes to independently continue development of Mythos, to which it owns the rights thanks to a loan agreement enacted with Flagship. Comerica now owns the Hellgate: London rights through a similar loan agreement, and will likely continue Asian development with HanbitSoft. As for English-language releases of the two games, it is possible that the Asian companies would continue development, but the fate of the US, Japanese and European version of Hellgate: London remain a mystery.
In short, Flagship’s time has run out, and all intellectual property may have been lost, all staff fired, and the studio closed. Flagship, we hardly knew ye…
Further Confirmation: A person going by the name of GLC who is claiming to be a former employee of Ping0 has made the following post on SomethingAwful to further confirm the company’s demise:
Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get shit done. It sucks, but that’s life I guess. I didn’t always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.
I think it’s less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn’t do anything the easy way. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. It was like picking everything that’s hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn’t worked together before.
Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a fucking genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn’t as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it’s a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.
Update: Guy Somberg, along with Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended in July 2008.
Kotaku’s closure story contains further confirmation from their own anonymous source.
Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li all list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended in July 2008.
Update: The official forum appears to be no longer moderated is inundated in spam.
Update: Programmer Producer Patrick Harris now has his positions at Flagship Studios listed as ‘past jobs’ and is no longer employed at Flagship Studios.
Update: Eric Liu is no longer in the employ of Flagship-Ping0. Having served for seven months as a QA Manager and Automation Engineer, he was promoted in October 2007 to International Producer, a position he held until the studio’s closure.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s IT Manager, Brent Shinn, Grant Watters, Greg Brown and Jonathan McEvoy are the latest Flagship-Ping0 employees to have listed their positions as previous experience on LinkedIn.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s Project Manager, Jack Wood, is now also an ex-employee. Jack had many important responsibilities, including: stakeholder, investor and regional distributor liaising; final say on all patch and product launches; and oversight of day-to-day end user support.
Update: Lead Graphics Engineer, Chris Lambert, is the latest to go. Chris was with the company for four years.
Update: With the help of one of our readers, we discovered that the poster going by the name of GLC on SomethingAwful is none other than one “Kalan Kier”, former Ping0 QA Manager.
According to GLC’s Something Awful user profile, his AIM screen name is “kkieratnl”.
A quick search on Google for “kkieratnl” reveals an archived forum post by GLC.
In the archived forum post, GLC states that his e-mail address is “kalankier@gmail.com“.
A further search on LinkedIn for “Kalan Kier” reveals that according to Kalan Kier’s LinkedIn profile, he was never a Ping0 employee. However, the LinkedIn Directory appears to have cached his former profile’s headline which indicates that he served as a QA Manager at Ping0.
Update: Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio claims that Hellgate players won’t be charged even if they are unable to unsubscribe due to the feature’s removal from account pages and is locking discussions related to the very subject, subsequently directing them to a ‘main thread’, in which she allows spam and posts her own; preventing any serious discussion from taking place.
Coincidentally, Diane publicly launched her own community support company the day after Flagship’s closure was made public.
Update: Community Manager Taylor Balbi publically denies having anything to do with the statement that was made to VE3D.
“Nothing Official has been stated about what is going on, everything you see or hear is speculation and rumors.”
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